17 Facts About Penelope Gilliatt

1.

Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic.

2.

Penelope Gilliatt began her work as a film and theater critic with London's The Observer, where she wrote numerous reviews between 1961 and 1967.

3.

Penelope Gilliatt's column ran from late spring to early fall, and Kael's for the remainder of the year.

4.

The contrasting perspectives of Kael and Penelope Gilliatt were a significant attraction to the magazine.

5.

Penelope Gilliatt's criticism tended to focus on visual metaphors and imagery, describing scenes from films in detail in her characteristically grandiose style.

6.

Penelope Gilliatt prided herself on knowing actors and directors personally, and tended to interweave her acquaintance with them into reviews of their films.

7.

Many of Penelope Gilliatt's readers appreciated her colorful and detailed writing, while other readers saw her style as distracting and superfluous to film criticism, and felt that her description of films was too complete.

8.

Penelope Gilliatt was approached by Schlesinger to collaborate on the script in part because of her debut novel One by One.

9.

Penelope Gilliatt wrote the first draft then left the project to take a job at The New Yorker.

10.

Penelope Gilliatt wrote several novels, including One by One, A State of Change, The Cutting Edge, Mortal Matters, and A Woman of Singular Occupation.

11.

Penelope Gilliatt celebrates the achievements of the North East, including the vessels Mauretania and Charles Parsons' Turbinia.

12.

Penelope Gilliatt praises the Torrens, the Sunderland-built ship on which Joseph Conrad served for two years from 1891.

13.

Penelope Gilliatt had an upper-middle class upbringing in Northumberland, where her father was director of the BBC in the north east from 1938 to 1941, and she retained a lifelong love of the Roman Wall country.

14.

Penelope Gilliatt attended Queen's College in London before earning a scholarship to attend Bennington College in Vermont.

15.

Penelope Gilliatt married neurologist Roger Penelope Gilliatt in 1954, and carried on using his name after their divorce.

16.

Penelope Gilliatt was then married to playwright John Osborne from 1963 to 1968, living at 31 Chester Square in central London in a house designed by architect Sir Hugh Casson.

17.

Penelope Gilliatt gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Nolan, whom Osborne later disowned.